jake

liya_rowan and I just went out to look at the snow, and she brought back a dry leaf, which I promptly put on my head and said to her, "Regarde mon chapeau!" ("look at my hat!"), to which she responds with a frown, "cheveux!" (hair!) and then runs across the room to pick up her hat, brings it over and holds it out to me.

I'm not sure if she was correcting my french, or my just my imaginative logic ("Silly papa, that's just your new hairdo, *this* is a hat!").

The truth comes out about Barack Obama.

I knew it was too good to be true, but somehow, I just had hope...

I know the economy isn't doing so hot lately, but there are still job openings out there occasionally - this one looks promising, if you happen to have deep thought sometimes about apples or horizons...

It's indeed possible that I've finally gone off of the deep end, but it's hard to tell sometimes, what with that whole catch-22 and all. I will probably have more to say on that topic, but it's far past my bedtime.



this post made possible by Google WiFi, a kind and generous public works project (even when it doesn't always work)

I'm thankful for amberphlame having made such an amazing mini-monster (as her/our fav. pj says), and I'm thankful that said mini-monster is finally feeling better, with less tummy pain and more alert time checking out her world.

And I'm thankful that oranchina and Stanton and their little Oona is doing great and were able to make it over for turkey-day, and we all look forward to when these two little brainy-babies will start hangin' out and getting to be best friends (so that when one day, one of them is a superhero, and the other is a supervillain [which is which will be up to *them*], they'll have the cool backstory of having been friends since their age was measured in *weeks*).

And I'm thankful that hw has come to work for my company and so will be around for the next who-knows-how-long, getting to see me and hang out with my clan and be here for xmas and so forth (and much geekery will be had by all!)

And hell, I'm thankful for a job which lets me get there at 10ish in the morning, leave at 3:30¹, do incredibly cool R&D projects [and buys me a nice dual quad-core monster of a box with 16G of ram to try stuff out on], and then give me a raise, a promotion, and possibly a bonus [pending] within the first 6 months being there.

There's of course always more that I'm thankful for, but the above list is pretty above-average, I'll say, so I'll cut it short at that.

Oh yeah, and I'm thankful for the fact that liya_rowan sitting still long enough for me to catch a few smiling pictures (finally!) and amberphlame has ordered those printed out so I can have them on my desk at work. :)

---

1: Although I do then get a shitload of work done back at home at night and on the weekend, much to amberphlame's dismay...

I have not been reading these all day.





I stopped for lunch


[Edit: I just finished them. Now I am sad.


Would it be creepy if I just started calling Randall's cell phone every five minutes and asking if he's finished the next one?


It's better than hitting refresh, right? 'Cuz it shares the love?]

an oldie, but a goodie. So how I wish it worked like this:

a) you're on the *first bus* of the morning
b) you're the first one on that bus
c) it's dark when you get to work after a 45min commute
d) your *bakery* next to work doesn't open until 20 minutes after you drop by, so you don't get your morning croissant
e) all of the above

:(

I'm not sure if I approve. I certainly know that liya_rowan and amberphlame don't.

will last forever: liya_rowan sleeping for hours on one arm. One handed coding up a math-tutor webapp for starmail / drinking an organic Amber ale with the other, amberphlame flitting about cooking something that smells delish in the kitchen...

At least, this moment will last forever if the Trafalmadorans view of the universe is correct (which I hope it is, for at least this moment).

I guess I haven't said it here yet, but just in case it needs verbalizing (in a written way), I am totally in love with liya_rowan. She's the most amazing little creature. There's nothing more wonderful than having her cuddled up, conked out in a little beanpod shape on my chest/shoulder while I'm dozing off, and hear her maman quietly say from across the bed, "she sure loves her papa..."

Announcing: liya_rowan! (and her first extra-utero lj post!)

Weighing in at 7lbs, 10 oz, after only a lighting-fast 2.5 hour labor, she flashed into this world so quick we barely had time to think straight. No "dad sitting around looking useless and worried and just waiting forever", no "breathe, conserve your strength, this will take a while". Nope, it was more like, "Hi, amberphlame, let me check your cervix and see how far along you are, now that I've finally gotten to your house" ... "ok, looks like you're *fully dilated*, the baby's coming... oh, RIGHT NOW!".

If I ever doubted the efficacy of labor-inducing acupuncture, I was wrong. amberphlame was only 1 cm dilated wednesday, and Liya was already 3 days overdue, but then 10 hours after getting acupuncture to help speed things along, *wham*, baby's here!

Pictures will be forthcoming, of course, but for now, a certain hard-working mom needs some breakfast.

It's not that I don't love you guys... it's just hard to post (for some reason, my 6am brain wrote "poast" first... and I thought it was right - I must be hungry for some tost) these days. Roughly 8 weeks until impending fatherhood (if you want to get liya_rowan a nice and practical 0'th birthday present like a pack of tushie wipes or a portable high chair, swing on over to her gift registry: here [if that link doesn't work, just go to myregistry.com and search for my first and last name]), whee!

In other news, to contrast with my last post - at work yesterday, the ability to get my job done depended on knowing what the average angle between two randomly chosen vectors in N-dimensional space (for large [but finite] N). It's not hard to figure out what the answer is if the vectors lie in the unit cube (it's O(log(N)/N), I think), but on the unit sphere is trickier (and as N grows, the disparity of the two answers is probably large). Anyone else happen to know the average dot product of two unit vectors in R^N, given an even distribution on S^N-1 ?

And now, I'm late - off yer butt, pbrane! Dog must be walked, bus must be caught! Next week: World Diplomacy Championships in Vancouver, where my diplomacy scoring system (and rails app to calculate it) will be used to determine The World Champion Backstabber^TM.

Meet the soon-to-be Liya Rowan O'Manichean de Baradat. liya_rowan, meet friends!



( I suppose I could have cropped these down a bit... )

... but what kind of excited father to be would I be if I'm not spamming your friends page? :P

and it's not even something *I* have to say:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

Interestingly enough, the Tralfamadorians aren't the only people who believe something like this - even some theoretical physicists do. But I guess there's some sort of conservation law for the number of time dimensions there are, because some other folk think there *2* time dimensions!

And so it goes, indeed.

Yesterday, I

• Heard another heartbeat, at about 140 beats per minute, within my lovely amberphlame's body. Zoinks! *That* is a serious trip. :)
  
• Got an email from UW Physics, telling me to take a hike: they say they would need to take serious convincing to be willing to fund me again. Like, evar. Hmmmm... was not really planning to go back just at the moment (see previous bullet point), but I kinda liked the idea of having that little "thing to do before leaving Seattle" sticky-note on my brain. :\
  

Ah well... I guess that is the way of the world: some amazing things come, other amazing things go, and life... well, life goes on.

Calling all nerds! I've got a horde of seven 9 year-olds coming over for a *sleepover* party of starmail's tomorrow night, and as Dungeon Master, I'm tasked with coming up with a way of maintaining their attention throughout 4pm - 10pm, and a little again in the following morning.

We're not playing the entire time - there's pizza break, play outside (weather permitting) while it's still light break, watch a little of Harry Potter / LOTR / Willow break, but still. They've been playing now for a year and a half, but they're still, well... 9 years old. And keeping the attention of 4 kids that age is one thing. But 7? The rounds of battle go too long, with too much "not doing anything" for each individual player.

I need to figure out a way (in the next 20 hours, after having had maybe 12 hours of sleep in the past 4 nights) to either a) plan an adventure around a Tourney / Faire / Gladiatorial something-or-other, so that we can have groups of them sometimes fighting others, but sometimes battling each other, and sometimes not everyone needs to be present: they can go off and play a video game or make noise or a mess or whatever 9 year olds do, while 3 or 4 of them battle it out in 2:2 gladiator combat or archery competitions. Orrrr... b) puzzle-filled adventure where they get split up in the maze, and half of the party is stuck trying to work its way out of a labyrinth, while the other half is searching for clues of what happened to the other half... but then how do I set one half loose with a map they're supposed to decipher and keep them occupied for 15-30 minutes? Or c) put them in command of a bunch of "troops" in some war sort of situation, and they're all rolling dice for battle (under my watchful eye!) in a chaotic simultaneous fashion, so they're all involved all the time, and I somehow just become a 7-part DM. Hmmm...

Any suggestions, Oh LJ-Nerd-Genie? The party consists of:

• Half-elven Ranger(2)/Sorcerer(1)
  
• Wood elf Barbarian(3)
  
• Gnome Bard(2)/(1) [will determine what to do with the new level tomorrow]
  
• Dwarf Cleric(2)/(1)
  
• Dwarf Fighter(2)/(1)
  
• Halfling Rogue(3)
  
• Half Dark Elf Rogue(1)/Cleric(1)
  
• Human Wizard(3)
  


They're smart kids, but they don't play more than once every 6-8 weeks, and none of them own any of the books, so they don't really know the Rules all that well, but they get the genre just fine. And they're pretty easily distracted. And I'm pretty easily flustered. And disorganized.

Maybe a cool standalone module would be good? But the party is so huge, and they're a little strong for their level too...

Maybe a tournament kind of thing would be good, they'd have a blast fighting it out against each other, and I could even let them go off and duel without me - I'd just be there to arbitrate disputes... and even when they're challenging non-party members, they could take turns taking control of their friend's enemy, and they're be motivated to play fair because the tournament would be structured so that they each individually want to win... but maybe breaking up party unity would be bad... maybe have a "team round" where they've made it toward the finals, and they all need to work together again? I dunno...

Help!

Every day (or at least every other day) I need to a) spend 15 minutes writing up some of my thoughts. Just because I have no time, doesn't mean I don't have thoughts I've thunk. b) unwind at night (after everyone's gone to bed) by playing some Go online. You can easily spend a mere 30-45 minutes on a good solid game, and I miss that. It's better for my brain then watching HBO, that's for sure.

Abbey is finally totally great at the off-leash dog park, and the weather is getting better, and I really need more exercise, soooo, I need to start going running/biking with Abbey down to Marymoor. She'd love it, I'd get a little better in shape, all around a big win for all.

I think I might be able to try this whole "morning person" thing. I took a different bus in to work today, the fastest of the expresses: route 268 starts a mere 600 meters from my house, then makes only 5 stops before hitting downtown seattle, but only makes 4 runs each morning (the latest leaves at 7:35am). Even better: I can do that 600 meters in record time if I'm willing to pull a little Parkour action (a la David Belle in Banlieue 13, but about a million times less hardcore).

Advantage of early morning person-ness:

• I think better, or at least differently, before 10 am.


• If I get to work by 8am, I can take off by 4pm, get home to spend time with the family, the put them all to bed, and then get in a few more hours of work in the late evening. I think that other than the 7am - 10am timeslot, the 9pm - 12am timeslot is my other best work period.


• Getting in this habit will be good practice for once the baby is around: amberphlame will want me home super early to relieve her of trapped-at-home-with-baby-all-day duties, and getting up early will be par for the course with an infant in the house, as will staying up late, I'd imagine. I can sleep at work in the afternoon! :P


• Commute time is *way* faster. Door to door including walking/Parkour'ing transit in under an hour, from the depths of east Redmond to Pioneer square. It can be easily 1.5 hours otherwise, and 2 hours if I'm walking to the Park and Ride to catch the other busses. That sucks donkey butt.


• Can get work done, at work, when nobody's here. Yay for that!

Ok, speaking of work, I should go do some - we're pitching to more VC's today, so gotta be on the ball...

mayhaps by you,

mayhaps by a grue.

but I when it comes down to it,

I don't really know who.

sometimes I fear I will be eaten.